“No underwear?” I said while falling backwards.
Leeza shrugged. “The lines.”
On my way down, I noticed Chip craning in for an up-the-dress peek. Before I could protest, I landed the hardest yet, this time with the crack of splintering wood.
“Stay down!” “Stop moving!” “Spread your weight!”
The pleas were unnecessary. My adrenaline was spent. The pain and stiffness had taken over, my imagination too. I pictured stepping through the coffin and snapping my grandfather’s atrophied legs. I froze.
Chip cupped his hands like a megaphone. “Alive down there?”
“I think I see the groundskeepers,” my mother said, the last to realize I’d rested my head on the casket and surrendered myself to the grave.
Being inches from my grandfather’s corpse was disconcerting, but the true burn came from what Grandpa Max symbolized: a cautionary tale. He was someone who’d found his destiny—the It that stopped time and the Her that stopped his heart—but let it all slip. He’d become a shadow of his best self, alive only when reminiscing, yet haunted each time he thought back, reminded that the life he’d lived wasn’t the one imagined. Regret spawned regret and the bitterness came through, took over. “Time with Max is like chewing barbed wire,” our family’s most tolerant aunt would say. I’d only seen Max smile when recounting his trumpet playing days, stories often starring Zoë, the woman in his one photo, a picture finger-worn from decades of holding.
My grandfather’s defeated life met the absurdity of me being stuck in his grave, and a laugh bubbled up. I took a deep breath to hold it back, but that only made me realize I’d gotten used to the grave’s earthy and citrus scent, I’d been there that long. The laugh half-escaped, got twisted by my effort to stifle it, and made me sound like a madman.
“Uh, Carver,” my mother called down. “Think happy thoughts, picture happy places…”
“Happy thoughts,” I said, shuddering, as my thoughts drifted from Max’s life and unfulfilled destiny to my own life—and to my destiny. Seeking higher wisdom, I knocked on the casket. “Which is worse,” I asked my grandfather, “finding your destiny and losing it, or finding the wrong one over and over?”
My mother cleared her throat, “Remember, happy thoughts, happy places…”
“Happy places,” I said, considering where I was in life. I’d been certain I had finally found myIt and Her. Before another laugh bubbled up, I shut my mouth, closed my eyes, and crossed my free arm over my chest mummy-style. With one arm bandaged and in a sling, I was halfway there anyway. It was the pose I’d pictured taking when I’d been thirteen and received the destiny before deathbed message from my father. I’d wanted to know how the end would feel, reaching my grave without having found destiny. I realized now that the teenage imagination of myself hadn’t been far off. A chuckle escaped. It hurt my ribs, shifting my focus to my chest. My pocket was empty. The watch was gone. In fighting the grave, I’d literally lost time. The cartoon absurdity gripped me. It wasn’t until my mother yelled down again that I realized the echoing laughs were mine.
“Carver! Remember…”
My mind carried me back twenty-two years to the week I’d turned thirteen and had begun my destiny-before-the-grave crusade. Had starting so early done more harm than good? Now that I was in the grave, what better time for a life review?